She was wearing the Cheyenne jingle-bob dance headgear, with a band of beaded sunbursts and feathers. It was different than any I had ever seen before; it had three loops of beads that draped below Melissa’s eyes. Trade beads flowed down past her ears to the mussel-shell choker at her throat and onto the elk-bone breastplate. There was also a cardboard number, printed in red, hanging from around her neck, and it read 383. Instantly, I wondered at the number of hours that her family must have taken to prepare her for the dance competitions. I hoped she had won. Her head turned from the direction in which the car was then slowly traveling. Her eyes were soft, yet animated, but they froze when they saw me. Her hand crept up against the glass, flattening against the surface with the pressure she applied. Her lips parted, just enough for me to glimpse the perfect white of her teeth, and she was gone.
Somewhere in all this musing, I noticed a fat little snowflake drift across my field of vision and settle against one of the concrete blocks and disappear. There were others, now that I noticed, gently floating through the cooling night air. Scientists say there is a noise that snowflakes make when they land on water, like the wail of a coyote; the sound reaches a climax and then fades away, all in about one ten-thousandth of a second. They noticed it when they were using sonar to track migrating salmon in Alaska. The snowflakes made so much noise that it masked the signals of the fish, and the experiment had to be aborted. The flake floats on the water, and there is little sound below; but, as soon as it starts to melt, water is sucked up by capillary action. They figure that air bubbles are released from the snowflake or are trapped by the rising water. Each of these bubbles vibrates as it struggles to reach equilibrium with its surroundings and sends out sound waves, a cry so small and so high that it’s undetectable by the human ear.
I looked up at the few remaining stars. It seemed that an awful lot of the voices in my life were so small and high as to be undetectable by the human ear.
I pulled out my pocket watch and read, 12:01.
7
We all have a list of the vehicles we forever despise. Mine began with the dull yellow ’50 Studebaker in which I learned to drive. It had the finely honed suspension and thrilling acceleration of a large rock. Another on the list was the M-151A1 Willys Jeep that the Corps made me drive in Vietnam, which flipped over a lot and which had the torturous habit of kneecapping me every time I went for third. But the one that has been the continual thorn in my vehicular side has always been Henry’s ’63 three-quarter-ton pickup truck. I was with him the day he bought it. We were in Denver for Game Day, sitting in a small Mexican restaurant behind old Mile High, the football stadium that didn’t look like a shopping mall. I read the Post ’s sports section, and he read the classifieds.
Three-quarter ton, V-8, four-speed, Warn lock-in/lock-out hubs, grill guard, headache rack, saddle tanks, and the heaviest suspension ever forged by man. The thousand-dollar price tag seemed too good to believe, and it was. They said it had been used to get Christmas trees from a farm they had over in Grand Junction; they didn’t say it had also been used to harvest them. It looked like it had come out of the ugly forest and had hit every one of the ugly trees. If there was a straight piece of metal on it, I was unaware of where it might be. It looked like it had been painted with crayons and poorly. The truck was mostly green, while the grill guard and headache bar were phosphorescent orange. He called it Rezdawg, and I called it misery. We had never taken a trip in it where it had not either broken down, run out, gone flat, overheated, or spontaneously burst into flames. “Get in.”
“No.” Henry had made me run, in the snow.
“Get in.”
“No.” He wanted to go to the Rez early, so I had to get a continuance on court day and cancel lunch with the judge.
“Get in.”
“No.” He had made me change my clothes, twice.
“Look…” His hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, and the majority of his face was hidden behind the hair. “We are undercover here.” I looked longingly at my comparatively brand-new truck, with a motor, suspension, and heater that worked; but my truck also had very large golden stars on the doors. They were handsome stars with the snow-capped Bighorn Mountains rising from an open book in their center, but incognito they weren’t.
He had opened the passenger-side door, and I was looking through the holes in the floorboards at the melting snow. Part of the dashboard was turquoise, part of it was white, and the large mic of an antiquated citizens’ band radio was bolted to the front edge over the shift lever. There was a shifter; a transfer-case lever; a worn, white steering wheel; and an unending number of chrome handles and knobs guaranteed to dislocate, jab, or stove anything that might come in contact. Most of the windows were cracked, and there were no seat belts. At the top of the antenna, even though there was no radio, perched a little, dirty-white Styrofoam ball that read CAPTAIN AMERICA. “It’s gonna break down.”
“It is not going to break down. Get in, I am getting cold.”
His breath was clouding the inside of the glass, and I looked down at the heater box, which was taped together with duct tape. “As I recall, the heater in this thing, among other things, doesn’t work.”
“I fixed it.” He really was undercover, dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt, army field jacket, and a khaki ball cap that read FORT SMITH, MONTANA, BIG LIP INVITATIONAL CARP TOURNAMENT. “Come on, get in.” I gave up and crawled onto the multilayered seat, repaired most recently with small bungee cords and a used Pamida shower curtain.
The truck had always been an enigma in Henry’s carefully ordered life, but it was something primal and important to him. He could have had it fixed, I mean really fixed, but he didn’t. Somehow, in all its ugly glory, it signified something about the thin-chested kid whose glittering eyes knew something I didn’t and never would. No matter how far he went, no matter what he did, he would always be from what we were going to today.
The truck wasn’t turning over. I saw his hand in his fingerless gloves holding the key to the right and two urgent red lights in the instrument panel that said GEN and OIL. He nodded knowingly like he knew what it was saying. “Do you have any jumper cables?”
After we pulled my truck over and got the Rezdawg started, we headed out slowly, because that was as fast as Rezdawg would go. We rolled like a Conestoga wagon across the bridge that divided the county from the reservation, and in a blink of an eye we were in a foreign country, a sovereign nation unto itself. The topography didn’t change all that much. The sun was up, and the light glowed from right angles highlighting the ridges and peaks in greeting-card warmth. The sharp edges of the turned pastureland pointed out the work ethic of the passing owners, some prepared for the arriving winter, some not.
Numbers always come to mind when I’m on the Rez, social numbers, government numbers, and life expectancy numbers: The average Indian dies eleven years before his white brother. I spent a lot of time ignoring these numbers when I was with Henry; they got in the way of seeing the people, and I had learned a long time ago that seeing these people was important.
“Are you armed?”
I felt a little guilt along with the pressure of the pancake holster at the small of my back. “Yep, why?”
He shrugged. “I just like to know.” We drove on for a while. “Do not shoot anybody, okay?”
“Okay.”
I watched the passing cottonwoods and scrub sage. “Where to first?” he asked.
“You tell me.”
“Oh, no. I am just the scout on this expedition.”
“I thought you guys left that stuff to the Crow.” He hunched over the wheel a little more and grunted. This was the response to the Crow in general; most of the Cheyenne I knew still hadn’t forgiven Kick in the Belly for scouting for Custer; most of the Indian Nations I knew about hadn’t forgiven each other much of anything. This had not been lost on the federal government, since they had put reservations of warring tribes alongside each other with regularity. “Where can we get some coffee?”